This site is designed to be a forum for news on in the document imaging, information capture, and enterprise content management industries. It's edited by Ralph Gammon, publisher of the Document Imaging Report, and an analyst of these markets. After almost 20 years, the document imaging market is finally reaching maturity and being subsumed into the world of more general IT applications. This makes it a very exciting time to be involved with the industry.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

I.R.I.S. Mobile Scanner

If you read my premium edition of DIR last week, you probably saw my article asking why we don't have a mobile scanner driven by mobile phones? Well, I got an e-mail from I.R.I.S. the other day talking about its IRIScan Anywhere device for capturing documents in the field. It's a mobile scanner that doesn't need to be driven by anything. You can save images to the device and upload them to a laptop/PC or save them to a USB. Here's a video. (Not sure where they got the pitchman.)

Someone suggested that this may be the answer to what I'm looking for, but I say no, for two reasons.
1. There is no way to preview the image-like you could with a SmartPhone- so you really don't know if you got a good image. And if you're scanning remotely, this could be a big deal. (Especially with the contract you just signed over dinner - per the example in the video.)
2. There is no possibility for immediate connection with third party applications, as the device is not online when scanning, or connected to a network like a Smart Phone would be. Sure, you could upload to your laptop/PC and go online afterward, but in a real-time business environment, I like the idea of a real time connection.